macrumors G4

What bad times that must have been for the Mac fans. Mac OS seemingly going nowhere, no suitable CEO to be found, not that great hardware....

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You have no idea. My poor little Performa was looking like the worst investment ever back then. Mac owners were jumping ship en masse, Apple was losing money hand over fist, and every day another company was announcing they were no longer going to be developing for the platform. It really looked like Apple was either going to be wound up or bought out for the patents.

When you look at it from those times, the work of Steve Jobs and those he brought with him in turning the company, its products and its finances around is incredible, certainly comparable to Iacocca's feat at Chrysler.

macrumors 604

Yeah.... I must admit I wish I were into Macs back then, so that I could have experienced the amazing "come back" led by Steve for myself, and have a feeling of "I knew it would all work out!"

I heard that Micro$oft even had announced dropping development of Office (4.2.1 ??) for Macintosh, and that the famous Apple - Micro$oft deal (when Gates' head appeared during Steve's keynote speech at a MacWorld) led to the first new MacOffice for quite some time: Office 98.
My first professional Mac experience was an iMac 233 MHz, Mac OS 8.5 and Office 98. Perfect office machine. I didn't know back then what Steve had to go through to make this "perfect office Mac" alive.....

macrumors G4

I heard that Micro$oft even had announced dropping development of Office (4.2.1 ??) for Macintosh, and that the famous Apple - Micro$oft deal (when Gates' head appeared during Steve's keynote speech at a MacWorld) led to the first new MacOffice for quite some time: Office 98.

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Well, there are all sorts of theories about that deal. One quite plausible version was that Microsoft's Windows Media Player was found to have huge chunks of code just cut and pasted from QuickTime for Windows, and that Steve gave Bill a choice to either publicly back or Mac or face another court case. Another version has Gates ringing Jobs to initiate the deal, fearing that Apple's demise would lead to Microsoft's break up by the DOJ.

It was quite a relief to see Office 98 on the shelves though. Finally you didn't have to jump through hoops with file conversion tools just to send a Word document to a Windows user. I stuck with the old Office on my Performa until late 1999 when I picked up my iMac DV and bought 98. A right happy day that was.

macrumors 604

I stuck with the old Office on my Performa until late 1999 when I picked up my iMac DV and bought 98. A right happy day that was.

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That must have been a huge improvement.
I have seen and used older Macs (Performa 6320 IIRC) later on when I started my Mac collection ) ), running System 7.5.3, ClarisWorks and MacLink Plus Deluxe.... and these Macs were actually used in offices as office (wordprecessing, email, internet) computers. I can understand the difficulties those users had with the compatibility with WinOffice users... These users must have hated their Macs.

Getting them iMacs with Office 98 would have been a huge, huge upgrade, and given them a good reason to still love their Macs.

macrumors G4

That must have been a huge improvement.
I have seen and used older Macs (Performa 6320 IIRC) later on when I started my Mac collection ) ), running System 7.5.3, ClarisWorks and MacLink Plus Deluxe.... and these Macs were actually used in offices as office (wordprecessing, email, internet) computers. I can understand the difficulties those users had with the compatibility with WinOffice users... These users must have hated their Macs.

Getting them iMacs with Office 98 would have been a huge, huge upgrade, and given them a good reason to still love their Macs.

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It was only when e-mail started to really take off in about 1995/96 that it got difficult. Before then you would work on your file and just print off a copy. MacLink Plus was sometimes needed when you were sharing using floppies, but mostly if you were networking it was with other Mac users.

The main problems were that Word 6.0 was buggy as hell and crashed all the time, and that when you got a crash on system 7, it would frequently lock up the entire Mac and force you to reboot. OS8 was better with that, although you had to heavily edit your extensions to get everything reliable, then OS9 went and ruined it all again. I started using OSX as my main OS as soon as 10.1 came out (10.0 was pretty difficult to cope with because it was so slow), and by the time Jaguar came out there was no going back.

I'll stop now. Starting to feel like some old guy saying "You don't know you're born" to the youngsters

macrumors 68030

Yeah.... I must admit I wish I were into Macs back then, so that I could have experienced the amazing "come back" led by Steve for myself, and have a feeling of "I knew it would all work out!"

I heard that Micro$oft even had announced dropping development of Office (4.2.1 ??) for Macintosh, and that the famous Apple - Micro$oft deal (when Gates' head appeared during Steve's keynote speech at a MacWorld) led to the first new MacOffice for quite some time: Office 98.
My first professional Mac experience was an iMac 233 MHz, Mac OS 8.5 and Office 98. Perfect office machine. I didn't know back then what Steve had to go through to make this "perfect office Mac" alive.....

... and it became even more perfect.

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Mac office was horrible before '98. ClarisWorks was a far more stable program. Then again, things like compatibility and emailing files didn't matter back then and Apple's Claris subsidiary put a lot of effort into their software. When Steve came in Claris was disbanded and Apple put almost no effort into the renamed Appleworks.

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